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by decree the phases of its natural development. But it can shorten the
period of gestation and lessen the pains of delivery."

We cannot, then, go against the tendencies of a society, but only direct
them toward the general good. So capitalistic society goes on irresistibly concentrating capital.

To attempt to stop this movement would be puerile; the necessary
step is to pass from the inevitable monopolization of the forces of
production and circulation to their nationalization, and that by a series of
legal measures resulting from the capture of political power by the working classes.

In the meantime the evil will grow. By virtue of the law of wages the
increase in the productivity of labor by the perfecting of machinery
increases the frequency of dull seasons and makes poverty more general by
diminishing the demand for and augmenting the supply of laborers.
That is easily understood.

For the natural production of values of utility determined and regulated
by real or fancied needs, which was in vogue until the eighteenth century,
is substituted the mercantile production of values of exchange,—a
production without rule or measure, which runs after the buyer and stops in its
headlong course only when the markets of the world are gorged to
overflowing. Then millions out of the hundreds of millions of prolétaires
who have been engaged in this production are thrown out of work and
their ranks are thinned by hunger, all in consequence of the superabundance
created by an unregulated production.

The new economic forces which the bourgeoisie has appropriated have
not completed their development, and even now the bourgeois envelope
of capitalistic production can no longer contain them. Just as industry
on a small scale was violently broken down because it obstructed production,
so capitalistic privileges, beginning to obstruct the production which
they developed, will be broken down in their turn: for the concentration
of the means of production and the socialization of labor are reaching a
point which renders them incompatible with their capitalistic envelope.

At this point the prolétariat , like the bourgeoisie, will seize political
power for the purpose of abolishing classes and socializing the forces of
production and circulation in the same order that they have been
monopolized by capitalistic feudalism.

The foregoing is an admirable argument, and Liberty
endorses the whole of it, excepting a few phrases concerning the
nationalization of industry and the assumption of political
power by the working people; but it contains literally nothing
in substantiation of the claim made for Marx in the Cooper
Institute resolutions. Proudhon was years before Marx with
nearly every link in this logical chain. We stand ready to give
volume, chapter, and page of his writings for the historical
persistence of class struggles in successive manifestations, for
the bourgeoisie's appeal to liberty and its infidelity thereto, for
the theory that labor is the source and measure of value, for
the laborer's inability to repurchase his product in consequence
of the privileged capitalist's practice of keeping back a part of
it from his wages, and for the process of the monopolistic